Conservative minority… better than a kick in the head
Nearly 75 per cent of visitors who clicked on my poll as of midnight think that Canada’s cleantech sector will suffer under a Conservative government. Mind you, only 26 people voted. Now that we know we’ll have a Conservative minority government, we can rest a little easier knowing it is a weak minority that will probably have a difficult time pulling out of Kyoto, as Conservative leader Stephen Harper promised. So it’s fair to say, I think, that under this new government cleantech won’t suffer much but it most certainly won’t move forward in any material way. That’s a shame.
I do hope that the Harper government will keep organizations such as Liberal-created Sustainable Development Technology Canada intact, given that it has contributed so much — from its $550 million investment fund – to the demonstration and commercialization of homegrown clean technologies. It has also done this in a way that gets the private sector fronting a majority of the bill.
I’m just happy this election is over, frankly, and that the bloated, arrogant bureacracy in Ottawa will be shaken up. It’s not the most ideal outcome, but it certainly was time for a change.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
February 1st, 2006 at 3:49 pm
Where did you find that picture of Harper? Creepy